Use of a new Tibetan Plateau network for permafrost to characterize satellite-based products errors: An application to soil moisture and freeze/ thaw

Two basic properties of soil moisture, namely water content and its phase status (freeze/thaw, referred to as F/ T), strongly influence the pattern and efficiency of water and heat exchanges at the land-atmosphere interface. Therefore, accurate soil moisture and F/T retrievals are crucial to explore the impact of soil moisture and temperature on multi-sphere interactions, especially in the permafrost region of the third pole (Tibetan Plateau, TP), which is highly sensitive to climate changes. However, given the difficulty of installing and maintaining ground stations in harsh environments, dense ground networks are scarce over the TP with an average altitude of 4000 m. In this study, we reported a new soil moisture and temperature wireless sensor network consisting of 10 stations, which were established over the permafrost in the WuDaoLiang region (referred to as SMN-WDL) of the TP in 2019. In situ measurements from the SMN-WDL were used to simultaneously assess satellite-based surface soil moisture (SSM) and F/T products. The reliability of categorical triple collocation (CTC) method was investigated by comparing CTC-derived and ground-based relative performance rankings. The results reveal that the low-frequency (L-band) passive microwave SSM and F/T products outperformed both high-frequency (C/X/ Ka-bands) passive and active microwave products, especially SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) SSM and F/T products displayed the best statistical metrics to SMN-WDL ground-based measurements. The existing satellite F/ T products had varying degrees of earlier freezing in autumn and later thawing in spring (mainly in ASCAT F/T) within SMN-WDL, which resulted in unsatisfactory thaw accuracy (< 85% in most cases) and overall accuracy (33.16% to 94.92%). In SMN-WDL, using existing F/T products as a masking criterion to filter out frozen soil for SSM validation studies would incorrectly mask out too many data samples and, lead to a decrease of the performance of SSM products. The overestimation of F/T thresholds may be one of the main reasons for the above misclassification of satellite F/T products. Compared to existing F/T products, the overall accuracy of threshold- optimal F/T retrievals can be increased by >10% during nighttime after optimizing thresholds based on ground -based measurements. CTC can provide consistent performance ranking with ground-based results in most cases, but the risk of CTC performing incorrect rankings was higher within the triplet where two products strongly covariate or one of the products has a significant error. This study is the first to use dense ground-based measurements in the permafrost region (SMN-WDL) to characterize the errors of four satellite SSM and F/T products. These results are expected to provide a reference with smaller representativeness errors for the further refinement of satellite retrievals in the permafrost region of the third pole.

Automated summary

Soil moisture and freeze/thaw (F/T) play a crucial role in water and heat exchanges at the land-atmosphere interface. This study reports the establishment of a wireless sensor network for soil moisture and temperature over the permafrost region of Tibetan Plateau. Satellite-based surface soil moisture (SSM) and F/T products were evaluated using ground-based measurements. The results show the reliability of L-band passive microwave SSM and F/T products, while existing F/T products display earlier freezing and later thawing, leading to unsatisfactory accuracy.